StarPhoenix city hall reporter Phil Tank interviewed retiring city manager Murray Totland just before he left the City of Saskatoon after more than 36 years.

Q: What will you miss most about your job?

A: A lot of things, actually. I’m really going to miss not being part of, kind of, all the excitement going on in the city. In particular, in all the time I’ve worked here, these last 10 years and the time I’ve been city manager, Saskatoon has been really transitioning and there’s a real buzz and excitement about Saskatoon. And being part of that, part of building this city that we live in, that’s pretty exciting.

And that’s one of the things about being city manager or being a city employee, period, just being part of building that city. I’m going to miss that. I’m going to miss it a lot, actually. Kind of the standards ones you always hear — the people. I’ve just got a great team and great people that work here. I’m just going to miss being part of this whole city operation.

After just about 40 years it just becomes part of you. Not getting up in the morning. I like getting to work early and getting some of the day’s work already attended to; it’s going to be a big change. These first few weeks after I leave here at the end of the month are going to be a little strange.

City of Saskatoon city manager Murray Totland during a council meeting, Monday, October 27, 2014.Greg Pender /
The StarPhoenix

Q: What is your advice for your successor?

A: I think where I’ve been successful and hopefully I’ve had at least a little bit of success in my job, you know, a lot of people look to the city manager for leadership and they’re expecting kind of a steady hand at the tiller and a bit of inspirational leadership. And so I think that’s important.

The city manager needs to be a bit of a calm in the storm sometimes, and people look to the city manager internally, but I’ve noticed even externally, a lot of people look to the city manager for a bit of assurance and reassurance that, hey, things are moving forward and progressing. So I think that’s important: Be visible both inside the corporation, but also be visible external to the corporation with a lot of our community partners, with community groups that we’ve worked with over the years.

Be a good coach. That’s important in this game. I’ve always viewed myself as a bit of the conductor of the orchestra, if you will. It’s been my job to make sure all my musicians are playing the same tune, so to speak. I hope I’ve been a little successful at that and I think that’ll be key to the new city manager.

And this whole change thing — that’s not going away. The one constant we are going to have as a city and I foresee that forever, to be honest, is change. We’ve had a lot of change in my time as city manager, but I can tell you, what’s coming looks like it’s even more. The pace of that change is increasing. The complexity of that change, a lot of the disruptive technologies and things that are coming along now, I think are going to fundamentally reshape civic governments. I’m not sure what that looks like right now exactly. It’s going to be pretty exciting, I think, pretty different, too, over the next 10 years.

A: When I presented the budget this year, I talked about some headwinds we’re facing and some challenges that we’ll face as a city.

I think certainly the city will continue to face financial headwinds, in particular our revenue situation as a city. And when I talk about revenues, I’m not talking necessarily about property taxes. I’m actually talking about the other part of our revenue stream that’s not property tax. We’ve seen a decline and a flattening of those revenues over, particularly, the last two, three years.

That trend is concerning — I mean they’re declining. We’re not seeing some of that revenue growth that I think we need to see as a city. So I think that’s going to be a pretty big challenge for the city to tackle, because it’s tough. To keep going to the property tax as the increasing source of our revenues is pretty tough. People have a general resistance to property tax increases or larger property tax increases. So these alternative revenue sources are pretty important to the city. Figuring that out I think is going to be a pretty big challenge for the city.

Dealing with some of our still-remaining infrastructure challenges, I think we’ve done a good job on some of them, but if you were paying attention to the asset management plan we brought forward just prior to budget, there’s still some of our key asset classes that need attention. Parks — people in the city care about our parks, so we need to do a little more work on that front for sure.

Q: What was the most important decision made during your time as city manager?

A: That’s a tough one. There’s probably been lots of them.

We had a difficult decision in how we were going to tackle the situation we were facing with the pension deficit in the city. That was a big issue and I think we all know that it was a difficult time with some of the labour difficulty we had there.

But that was a $100-million problem the city was facing. And we were able to eventually solve that, essentially, and, you know, put that behind us. That was a really important moment for us. That was a pretty big risk the city was facing and a pretty big liability the city was facing. So we got that one behind us and that was a very positive thing. But that was a pretty big decision to make at the time.

Lots around infrastructure — that whole decision around starting to make larger investments in our infrastructure. Those were never easy because some of them, as you know, went to the property tax again. And, you know, that investment in roads, I think all of our citizens love what they’re seeing on our road infrastructure and the improvements. But I give council a lot of credit for that seven per cent property tax increase they supported back in 2013 or 2014 or whenever it was. That was a big step and a big decision, I think, at the time.

City of Saskatoon workers fill a pothole on the corner of First Avenue North and King Street in Saskatoon on April 5, 2017. Saskatoon StarPhoenix

Q: You were city manager under two mayors. What are some of the differences between former mayor Don Atchison and Mayor Charlie Clark?

A: I think their interest and vision for the city is very consistent, but they certainly are two different individuals.

I would see our current mayor as more thinking about the evidence and all of the surrounding information pertaining to an issue and he likes the research and all the supporting factual evidence and then the background to it.

Whereas mayor Atchison, he probably had more of a gut instinct on some things and kind of just had a good understanding. Not that he didn’t pay attention to what the data and the facts were telling him, but I think in a lot of cases he relied more on his instincts. And that would probably be the big difference I see in the two.

I think they both ended up making great decisions. It’s just a different approach and I think both were effective, that’s for sure.

Q: What is the greatest improvement you’ve seen in your time with the city?

A: Some of it is internal. I just think of the sophistication of our internal system and our approach to delivering service. It’s night and day even from where it was even a decade ago.

Externally, what our citizens face, I think generally we’ve been tackling some of the deficits that we’ve seen in our infrastructure and kind of the amenities in the city. I think there was a period of time in the late ’80s and in the early ’90s where there just wasn’t the type of investment that we needed in some of our infrastructure and as a result it suffered. And it declined and there was a deficit and there’s been a long road and there still is a road ahead of us to recover from that and to make a needed investment.

But I think we’ve come a long way in the last 10 years even. You think of the roads in the city, you think of the transportation network in the city, you think of some of the other amenities in our city that we didn’t have 10 years ago that we have today. I think it’s just made it a much better community for everyone as a result of that.

Q: What was the worst decision you’ve seen at city hall or a regret you have?

A: There’s probably been some labour relations type issues. I mean these are internal. These wouldn’t be things that the average citizen would necessarily see.

The labour disruption that we had in 2014, that was a very difficult time for everyone and I never wanted to see that get to the point that it got to, where we had our employees on the picket line. That was a difficult situation, both for them and for us. Whether or not it was a bad decision I don’t know. I regret it ended up the way it did. I was always hopeful that we could have got to a more collaborative solution and approach to that. It unfortunately didn’t go in that direction.

So that would probably be one of my big regrets as city manager, anyhow, that I wasn’t able to guide that in a little different direction, maybe get it to a little different result without having to go through a pretty difficult time for the city and our citizens because there was a disruption to our transit service . Everybody did feel that.

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